World Sparrow Day 2012

Residents of the Americas may find this hard to believe, but the ubiquitous, adaptable House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) is declining in its native lands. We should all be concerned about this, if not out of love for this prosaic passerine then because the sparrow may very well be a signal species for more encompassing environmental threats. World Sparrow Day is celebrated annually on March 20th to raise awareness across the globe about the decline of the House Sparrow and how it impacts all of us.

We’ll be celebrating World Sparrow Day 2012 by running some of our favorite House Sparrow posts. Join us by sharing in the comments your best posts or photos of House Sparrows. Or just leave a kind word for a much-maligned bird whose steady presence we take for granted!

Mike is a leading authority in the field of standardized test preparation, but he's also a traveler who fully expects to see every bird in the world. Besides founding 10,000 Birds, Mike has also created a number of other entertaining but now extirpated nature blog resources, particularly the Nature Blog Network and I and the Bird.

My birding friends ignore house sparrows for the most part, but I love them. A male spent the winter below my window in a small bush. Each morning he wakes and chirps. He chirps so much I really don’t need my alarm, and soon he will have a new family.

Greetings from Austria (in Europe!)!
A lot of people around here love sparrows and frankly, they are my favourite birds. I can’t get myself to love any other species of birds more than sparrows. 🙂 It’s just too bad that the most common bird here in Vienna is the domestic pigeon. I hardly ever see any sparrows while being at my parent’s place in the country side. That’s just too bad. In a way of saying, ‘what if’ I kind of have this silly idea of just catching as many sparrows you can in North America and then ship them off to us. <3 But I know, that's silly and not going to happen.